“Women in Love” in the Arabic Poetry of the Cairo Genizah

Abstract This article explores the female voice in a set of poems in the Cairo Genizah corpus. It looks at the agency of women in those love poems to see how they expressed their love, how they responded to male love, and how they engaged in dialogues and wordplay with their lovers. Women in the Genizah enjoyed visibility, especially in love poems that allowed them the space to share an important social and psychological dimension. Together with legal documents and letters, the poems shed light on certain aspects of culture in medieval Cairo and provide nuance to our understanding of gender relations. Brought to light for the first time, the fragments reveal the space of women in the literary world of the Genizah. Even if not authored by women, the poems give them voice and character and highlight a sense of personhood and female subjectivity.